Posts from the Sunset Park Category

Pedestrians now have expanded median islands, like this one at 20th Street, for safer crossings on Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park. Photo: @J_uptown

Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, from 65th Street to 15th Street, is getting its road diet after Brooklyn Community Board 7 overwhelmingly approved changes to the street in May.

Seven pedestrians were killed in traffic along the corridor between 2006 and 2011. To make it safer, DOT is reducing Fourth Avenue from three lanes in each direction to two, with expanded medians for crossing pedestrians and a wider parking lane, as shown in thesephotos sent by reader @J_uptown on Twitter..

Drivers now have two lanes instead of three, as shown at 43rd Street. Photo: @J_uptown

A driver has been charged with manslaughter and homicide for the hit-and-run death of a Brooklyn pedestrian.

Police say Alberto Serrano, 31, was struck down by Javier Hernandez on 51st Street at Third Avenue, a few blocks from Serrano’s home in Sunset Park, at around 7 p.m. Monday. Serrano, a husband and father of two young daughters, suffered severe head trauma and died at Lutheran Hospital, according to reports.

Hernandez was charged with second degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, leaving the scene, reckless driving, failure to obey a traffic control signal, and speeding, according to the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.

It is not often that charges are brought against a sober driver for killing a New York City pedestrian or cyclist, even when the motorist flees the scene. On the rare occasion that such cases are pursued, thanks to rickety state laws and courts that tend to coddle killers who commit their crimes behind the wheel, justice is far from assured. We will follow the case against Javier Hernandez as it develops.

This fatal crash occurred in the 72nd Precinct. To voice your concerns about neighborhood traffic safety directly to Captain James Grant, the commanding officer, go to the next precinct community council meeting. The 72nd Precinct council meetings happen at 7:30 p.m. on the second Tuesday of the month at Mariem Heim Center, 4520 4th Avenue. Call the precinct at 718-965-6326 for information.

The City Council district where Alberto Serrano was killed is represented by Sara González. To encourage González to take action to improve street safety in her district and citywide, contact her at 212-788-7372 or sgonzalez@council.nyc.gov.

In an overwhelming 31-2 vote (with three abstentions), Brooklyn Community Board 7 passed a motion last night in favor of re-engineering Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park for greater safety. The NYC DOT project [PDF] will add a substantial amount of pedestrian space at intersections from 65th Street to 15th Street, widening medians and narrowing crossing distances on the 88-foot wide street.

Image: NYC DOT

This stretch of Fourth Avenue, currently three moving lanes in each direction plus turn bays, is one of the deadliest streets in Brooklyn, with seven pedestrians killed in traffic between 2006 and 2011. Some of the current medians are less than two feet wide. Under the plan, the narrowest medians would at least triple in width, and wider ones would expand too. The pedestrian space will be reclaimed by converting 17-foot wide combined parking and travel lanes on each side of the street into 13-foot wide parking lanes, though three travel lanes will be maintained northbound during the morning rush, from 38th Street to 17th Street. The changes would be implemented with low-cost materials — epoxy, gravel, planters, flexible posts — and DOT can complete them by this fall.

At a hearing hosted by CB 7’s Fourth Avenue Working Group on Monday, neighborhood advocates said the changes were a long time coming.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the environmental justice non-profit UPROSE, said she could remember discussing traffic calming and greener infrastructure for Fourth Avenue with CB 7 district manager Jeremy Laufer 15 years ago. “This is not new,” she said, urging the board to vote for the plan. “We’ve been talking about these things for a long time in Sunset Park. If we miss the opportunity, we might not get these improvements.”

Lined with schools, subway stations, churches, and stores, Fourth Avenue is full of destinations for this bustling neighborhood of predominantly car-free households. DOT has been working intensively with neighborhood groups and local schools to develop the Fourth Avenue plan. A workshop in February brought together English-, Spanish-, Cantonese-, and Mandarin-speakers to gather ideas about what needs to change on the avenue.

“Almost everyone who goes to school on Fourth Avenue walks there,” said project manager Jesse Mintz-Roth. “The narrowness of the medians came out over and over in the workshops.”

Last week, three children were struck by a turning driver at Fourth Avenue and 44th Street, one of whom was injured. The crash was fresh in the minds of several participants at Monday’s hearing, including Yesenia Malave-Lee, PTA president at P.S. 503, who said the threat of traffic violence looms over every parent walking their kids to school on Fourth Avenue. “I’m all for the changes being made here,” she said.

It’s hard to imagine a street in more dire need of a safety upgrade than Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Lined with schools, senior centers, subway stations, churches and stores — and situated in one of the city’s top walk-to-work neighborhoods — the street is a magnet for pedestrians of all ages. It’s also a speedway for motorists. Now it looks like this part of Fourth Avenue will get a safety-minded makeover as soon as this fall.

Image: NYC DOT

With six lanes of moving traffic, plus left-turn bays, Fourth Avenue is wide and dangerous to cross. From 2006 to 2011, seven people were killed while walking on the stretch between 65th Street and 15th Street. Dozens more were seriously injured. Pressure to reduce the death toll has been mounting in recent years, and Borough President Marty Markowitz’s Fourth Avenue Task Force has helped raise the profile of the street’s shortcomings and its potential.

Earlier this week, NYC DOT staff presented a package of safety improvements [PDF] for this two-and-a-half mile section to Brooklyn Community Board 7’s Fourth Avenue working group. The recommendations would essentially slim the street down from six lanes to four lanes and add pedestrian space in the median using low-cost materials like paint, epoxy, and gravel.

DOT has been holding workshops on Fourth Avenue with CB 7 and local organizations since last year, and the recommendations were well-received by the working group. “These workshops with the DOT have been very good, and they’ve listened to us,” said CB 7 chair Fred Xuereb.

Currently, outside of rush hour, most motorists speed on the wide expanse of Fourth Avenue, and in the evening the figure is as high as 80 percent of southbound drivers, according to DOT. By expanding medians (some of which are now only a meager two-feet wide), adding left turn restrictions and slimming down the right-of-way for traffic, the project would shorten crossing distances, reduce conflicts between pedestrians and motorists, and at least partially remedy the street’s out-of-control speeding problem.

The route for proposed Hylan Boulevard Select Bus Service. Bus lanes are planned for the highlighted areas, where congestion is worst. Image: MTA/DOT

When it comes to Staten Island, the Department of Transportation and MTA are considering a different model for Select Bus Service.

The service planned for Hylan Boulevard will provide dedicated bus lanes for less of the route than on existing SBS lines, but high-tech features like transit-friendly traffic lights and even a possible pilot of smart card fare payment technology will be included.

Bus service along Hylan Boulevard is an essential lifeline for transit riders on Staten Island. Sixteen thousand local bus riders travel on the street every weekday, as do another 15,000 express bus riders. One-third of all Staten Island bus commuters live along the corridor. Those numbers might be even higher if transit service weren’t so slow. Almost three-quarters of transit commuters in the area have trips longer than an hour.

A final plan hasn’t been prepared for the new bus service, but DOT and the MTA presented the basic concept at a public meeting last Thursday [PDF]. The project is scheduled to be implemented in 2012 or 2013.

Unlike on the existing Select Bus Service routes on Fordham Road and First and Second Avenue, DOT is not planning to paint dedicated bus lanes along most of the route. Instead, they’re installing bus lanes in the three most congested areas: a roughly two-mile stretch toward the northern end of the route; the area where the S79 bus turns off Hylan and toward the Staten Island Mall; and near the entrance to the mall itself.

The Staten Island service will have a number of features not found in Manhattan and the Bronx, however. “Advance signals” will allow buses to stop a little further forward at an intersection than private vehicles. Currently, buses stopped at the curb and cars trying to turn right have to weave past each other; with advance signals, there’s room to separate the movements, speeding up traffic. The advance signal could also let buses jump to the front of the queue at certain red lights.

Another feature, transit signal priority, holds green lights a few extra seconds when a bus is approaching, giving precedence to vehicles carrying dozens of people rather than one or two. When tested out on Staten Island’s Victory Boulevard, it shaved ten percent of the time off bus trips (and five percent of the time off private automobile trips). This spring’s update of PlaNYC promised that eleven bus routes across the city will get transit signal priority. Hylan Boulevard will be one of them.

A reader sent in these photos of a sidewalk cave-in next to the office of Assembly member Felix W. Ortiz, on Fourth Avenue and 55th Street in Sunset Park:

Over the weekend, a bunch of neighbors called in the ominous crack in the sidewalk to 311 (resulting in tape! And a safety horse!), and this morning that crack became a gaping sinkhole. Luckily no one appears to have been injured.

Here's what the sidewalk looked like after the slab began to buckle, a situation that festered for a few days:

A full crowd of about 60 people turned out for NYCDOT's Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway workshop in Sunset Park last night. The meeting was the second of four sessions the city is putting on with the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and the Regional Plan Association, as the years-in-the-making project of a continuous pedestrian and bicycle path tracing the Brooklyn waterfront moves from the concept phase to more detailed planning and engineering.

Determining a buildable greenway route in Sunset Park is a complicated proposition. The waterfront is an active industrial district filled with the sort of facilities that pose logistical hurdles for safe walking and biking. West of the BQE, the greenway route will have to negotiate obstacles like the 65th Street rail yard, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and the active freight rail corridor on First Avenue. It won't be easy, but as Brooklyn Greenway Initiative planning director Milton Puryear
told me last night, it's a place where you've got to think big.

A finished greenway in Sunset Park would bring huge payoffs. Sunset Park has one of the highest walk-to-work rates in the city, and a major new waterfront park is slated for the Bush Terminal Piers. So in addition to providing a route along the waterfront, the greenway project is a chance to connect the residential areas east of Third Avenue to the new park and the waterfront's industrial job center, using safe walking and bicycling paths. There's already a well-established base of local support for creating those connections: The United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE) started holding public workshops about the greenway and waterfront access in 2005.

Juror Michelle de la Uz, director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, listed
safety and the pedestrian environment as her top concerns. "That intersection has been the
site of significant injuries to pedestrians, and it's screaming for a
re-design for all the different users," she said. "What's going on at that intersection is representative of the whole
stretch. When you go to Sunset Park, there are four, soon to be five
schools along Fourth Avenue. Public safety has to be a priority instead of just moving traffic."

"The entries really ran the gamut," said de la Uz. "There were definitely elements in each one that DOT could
cull from, not only for Fourth Avenue but throughout the city."

T.A. wants to see the competition's best ideas factor into the city's
long-term plans. "A lot of the City's current work is about triage --
bringing paint and asphalt to streets that really need immediate safety
fixes," says Wiley Norvell. "The design competition was about
leapfrogging ahead of the current generation of street designs to
provide much more active and dynamic public spaces. We hope the DOT and
City Planning take note of what's been generated."

The city's public schools are back in session today, and students, parents and staff at P.S. 24 in Sunset Park should have a safer intersection to contend with at 38th St. and Fourth Ave., near a BQE off-ramp, following a simple signal timing adjustment.

After months of community pressure, city Department of Transportation officials promised Brooklyn News the traffic-light timing would be adjusted over the weekend ... with an increased interval allowing pedestrians more time to cross the street.

"A little call from a reporter never hurt anything," said Principal Christina Fuentes who was notified by Brooklyn News late last week - not the DOT - that the light would be adjusted.

A third-grader was hit by a car and injured near the school last spring, prompting parents and others in the neighborhood to seek safety improvements -- along with Transportation Alternatives, which has consistently cited signal timing as an easy and effective means of reducing pedestrian injuries and deaths.

Transportation Alternatives has requested safety measures for other schools along dangerous Third and Fourth Aves., said TA official Brooke DuBose.

More than 30 pedestrians have been killed along the avenues since 1995 - including six children since 2004, according to TA figures.

Meanwhile, in Bushwick, a 7-year-old who was looking forward to starting first grade today was run down by two vehicles on Sunday as he crossed Bleecker Street with his mother and 8-year-old brother. Christian Acteopan died after being hit by a Mitsubishi Eclipse, which fled the scene, and a second vehicle traveling behind. The driver of the Eclipse was found and charged with leaving the scene of an accident; the second driver stayed at the scene and was not charged.

Acteopan's death comes less than a week after the unveiling of the heart-rending monument to three children killed by motorists on Third Avenue. The event included an announcement that DOT will be making long-awaited pedestrian safety improvements to intersections throughout Downtown Brooklyn.

For a sense of the challenge that lays ahead for congestion pricing supporters, take a look at the mailer that Brooklyn Democratic State Senator Velmanette Montgomery sent to all of her constituents last week. Montgomery has a smart, engaged staff when it comes to transportation policy and she has often been helpful when it comes to Livable Streets issues.

Her 18th Senatorial District covers Bed-Stuy, Boerum Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, Gowanus and Sunset Park -- a swath of Brooklyn that is absolutely pummeled by regional through-traffic and epidemic asthma rates. Clearly, Montgomery's district stands to gain more than most from reductions in traffic congestion and improvements to mass transit and air quality.

Yet, in her mailing, Montgomery says Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan "is silent as to the benefits for the outer boroughs and for upper Manhattan." For that and other reasons she has "major reservations" about the proposal. Montgomery then presents a number of informational points and objections to the pricing plan while offering no suggestion of any benefits to her constituents.

One of the arguments stands out. Montgomery writes, "The congestion pricing measure will not help asthma sufferers." That one appears to be pulled directly from pricing opponents' talking points and, by most reliable accounts, is not based in fact.

If the Senate Democrats matter in the coming debate then, clearly, congestion pricing supporters have some work to do.

If you get congestion pricing mailings and letters from your elected officials, please send them to Streetsblog. Find Montgomery's mailing, in full, after the jump...